Elle.com: Kyle Chandler Is Done Playing Mr. Good Guy

After years of playing by the rules, Bloodline's Kyle Chandler is sullying that clear-eyed, full-hearted reputation.

There's an early scene in Netflix's Bloodline that positions Kyle Chandler where we might expect him: As John Rayburn, the golden son/county sheriff in a dynastic Florida Keys family burdened by the weight of its own secrets, the Friday Night Lights alumnus lugs his unconscious older brother, Danny, through a swamp made even more treacherous by unrelenting rain.

Ostensibly, Chandler is a savior, again the good guy trying to do the right thing. "Kyle's got very broad proverbial shoulders," says Ben Mendelsohn, who plays Danny on the 13-episode drama. "He can pick up that load, and he can carry that load." But moments later, after John incinerates his brother's body on an abandoned boat, setting off a season-long murder mystery, it's clear that Eric Taylor has left the building. Adds Mendelsohn: "I think John is more like, 'Why can't another person carry this load for a bit?'"

It's a subtle shift in accountability, but one that illuminates a dimension of Chandler his fans have yet to see properly. Since moving on from his career-making, Emmy-winning turn as the incorruptible high school football coach on the now-cult NBC-cum-DirecTV series in 2011, Chandler has carefully played his hand in Hollywood, acting as a puffed-up straight man opposite big-screen hotheads. There he was, macho and in charge, grilling Jessica Chastain as Islamabad CIA station chief in Zero Dark Thirty, calling Leonardo DiCaprio's bluff in The Wolf of Wall Street, and furrowing his brow while Ben Affleck saved the day in Argo. His true gifts—unflinching vulnerability and slow-burning virility that rouse strength in men and weak knees in women—were only partly visible in his portrayal of Miles Teller's alcoholic deadbeat dad in 2013's The Spectacular Now. But back on the small screen as Rayburn, a rumpled family man who will do anything to keep his secrets safe, there's a return to form, a comfort with the Chandler we know, combined with the intriguing ambiguity of a layer we don't. "People trust the characters I play," Chandler says, "which makes it a little more enjoyable to go to the other side."

To get to the crux of the 49-year-old's impact— described as "gravitas" by Mendelsohn and a "sense of certainty" by Daniel Zelman, Bloodline's cocreator—it's worth examining his past. Born the youngest of four to a farm owner and medical-supplies salesman father and a dog-breeder mother, Chandler and his family moved from Chicago to Loganville, Georgia, when he was 11. An eventual member of the state's 1979 high school championship football team, he quit the sport after freshman year when his father died. Later, seven credits shy of a drama degree from the University of Georgia, he moved to L.A. to sign a contract with ABC that led to an eight-episode arc on the Vietnam series Tour of Duty. Chandler's easy smile, young-Elvis bone structure, and ability to sport both a Stetson and a tailored suit landed him consistent, if largely inconspicuous, leading roles, ranging from a post-WWII ballplayer in ABC's Homefront to a clairvoyant stockbroker with the ability to change tomorrow's headlines on CBS's Early Edition.

But it wasn't until director Peter Berg adapted Friday Night Lights—H. G. Bissinger's best-selling book turned film about a football-worshipping Texas town—for television that audiences fell head over cleats in love. By then Chandler, nearly 40, had been acting for almost 20 years and married for 10, had two daughters and several dogs, and was gearing up to run a 33-acre ranch in Dripping Springs, Texas. He was a fully formed, capital-M man—and it showed.

"It's a different sensibility you have to pack in your bag when you go off and do a film," Chandler says. "I know television, and I really enjoy the ownership you're allowed to have of a character." So, whether leading young men to victory or carrying grown ones to their grave, over the duration of many hour-long episodes here is how he best showcases his arsenal: a strong bullshit meter, a whiskey-stiff upper lip, and a keen understanding of when to convey, through just the narrowing of his coffee-black eyes, that he's hiding something. That's the good stuff, but you have to put in time to get it. "He can be devilish and off-color," says Zelman. "He doesn't lead with that, but it's there." Says Chandler's FNL on-screen wife, Connie Britton, the other half of perhaps the most inspiring marriage in TV history: "He'll disappear and turn out to have done something crazy, like gone on a motorcycle ride or grabbed a six-pack of beer when you're about to take a road trip." And when he gets busted? "He'll come back with a big Cheshire grin."